“Depression is Real”—Real To A Psychiatric-Pharmaceutical Industry That Profits $14 Billion A Year From It
3 Oct, 2006
“National Depression Screening Day: Disease Mongering, Drugs, and Potentially More Deaths,” human rights group charges
LOS ANGELES: October 5 marks one of the biggest marketing scams in American history, yet despite complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about fraudulent claims of a biological basis to mental illness, the pharmaceutical company-driven “national depression screening day” continues to mislead millions of Americans that their brains are chemically imbalanced, requiring mind-altering drugs to fix them. The FDA warns these drugs cause hostility, agitation, mania and suicide, which is particularly alarming given the recent spate of school shootings and the fact that many of the shooters were taking violence and suicide-inducing psychiatric drugs, resulting in 29 dead and 62 wounded. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a psychiatric watchdog that in 1991 helped force the FDA to hold hearings into the violence and suicide-inducing effects of the antidepressant Prozac, said that thousands of people have committed suicide or heinous violent acts while under the influence of antidepressants that “depression screening day” advocates.
CCHR will conduct impromptu visits to “depression screening” sites to hand out fliers to passersby recommending that before agreeing to any screening, they ask questions to verify the scientific validity of the questionnaires and who funds them. Pharmaceutical companies have poured millions of dollars into the annual depression screening campaign since it’s inception in 1991. During the following decade, there was a 300% increase in those “treated” for depression. In the last 15 years there has been a 1,900% increase in antidepressant sales that have now reached $14 billion a year.
Recently, Wyeth, the manufacturer of Effexor—an antidepressant that has made the company $3.7 billion—helped fund a depression campaign, part of which was an ad placed in USA Today, claiming a biological basis to depression and that treatment can “restore brain cell connections and lead to recovery.” Five psychiatric lobby groups—all heavily funded by drug companies—put their name to the ad. CCHR’s U.S. president, Bruce Wiseman, says such advertising is “disease mongering, psychiatric fraud, and misleads vulnerable people in need of real help into thinking that a mind-altering drug can fix their problems in life.”
Many medical experts such as Joseph Glenmullen of Harvard Medical School and author of Prozac Backlash, say that the “chemical imbalance” theory is “faulty logic, pseudoscience.” Further, “[W]hen one examines the questions asked and the scales used [to determine depression], they are utterly subjective measures…,” Glenmullen stated. Any attempt to “help patients understand themselves and to effect real change is lost in the rush to diagnose and medicate them.”
Jonathan Leo, associate professor of anatomy at Western University of Health Sciences says, “If a psychiatrist says you have a shortage of a chemical, ask for a blood test and watch the psychiatrist’s reaction. The number of people who believe that scientists have proven that depressed people have low serotonin (chemical) is a glorious testament to the power of marketing.”
Leo’s question is one of 10 CCHR suggests people ask before filling out a depression questionnaire.
The USA Today ad also claimed that untreated depression kills, ignoring the evidence that antidepressants do not effectively prevent suicide, are no more effective than placebo (dummy pill) and worse, those taking them are between 1.5 and 7 times more likely to commit suicide. At least 100 children have committed suicide while taking antidepressants, although as only 1% of adverse reactions are reported to the FDA, the death toll could be 10,000.
Psychiatrist David Shaffer of Columbia University invented one screening program, “TeenScreen,” used in schools throughout the United States. Shaffer admits that 84% of children screened could be wrongly identified as at risk of suicide using the model. Kelly Patricia O’Meara, author of Psyched Out: How Psychiatry Sells Mental Illness and Pushes Pills That Kill, says: “Since when does an 84% failure rate equate to a reliable scientific test?”
Wiseman says you only need to count up the drug money—more than $70 million during the past 10 years—given to the American Psychiatric Association and its advocacy front groups supporting the depression campaign to see the real motive behind it. “Recent psychiatric studies claim that 50% of Americans are now mentally ill. This statistic and those touted by the depression screening cabal are fabricated, based on the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a document that is scientifically meaningless and which teaches people to look for psychiatric answers to every social and personal problem.”
“You often hear: ‘There are 10 million Americans with this, three million Americans with that,”‘ says Barbara Mintzes, an epidemiologist at the University of British Colombia’s Center for Health Services and Policy Research. “If you start adding up all those millions, eventually you’ll be hard put to find some Americans who don’t have such diagnoses.”
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. Contact CCHR's Media Department at 800-869-2247 or humanrights@cchr.org.
